And this is a wrong interpretation to take as well. As truthseeker says, there are many many parents who DO choose this environment over that of the US. There are many women who choose it. There’s a growing number of female expatriates of other nationalities who live alone in India. There are many Indias within India. Some of them are perfectly safe and good for women. But in the process of all these Indias coming together, there will be frictions, growing pains, call it what you will. You deal with it in your everyday life, and try to change it at the same time.
but aren’t they choosing to live there despite the problems? or is he wrong and there are entire cities (the south?) where you could picture your daughter roaming around safely, alone?
Of course, the consent has to come from all mature\adult parties involved.
But when one is taking decision for their little children, then some small steps taken do ensure safety and so, it shouldn’t be the deciding factor for someone who has grown up here and knows about the present day India.
the culture, the people, the festivals, the food, the diversity, the freedom and the experiences of someone who has grown up in this great country - they far outweigh such ‘small’ precautionary steps. Most of the rich people do not use the public buses anyways - not just because of safety.
I don’t quite understand what you’re saying, but I’ll attempt a response. Bombay is a city which is completely safe. I have often seen drunk girls in tiny skirts take autorickshaw rides home at 2/3 am when the clubs shut. Most large Indian cities(which are anyway south or east, except Delhi) are more or less completely safe in the day, and marginally less so at night. Even in Delhi, hundreds of thousands of women go about their work/play alone without getting abused.
The problem of needing to be more careful and wary exists, but for many parents/people the extra costs and attitude shifts involved in avoiding it are marginal, especially for people who could afford the move to other countries. Yes, you don’t want your girl out alone late at night. Answer? Hire a chauffeur. Teach her to be more careful. Make sure her friends accompany her. I presume for parents who do want their children to maintain a connection with their country and family, these additional costs are outweighed by the benefits. Also, circumstances tend to be very different when you live in them. My female friends are not constantly living in terror of being groped or leched at. If it happens, they deal with it. It is upsetting, but not always so traumatic that it significantly affects your overall quality of life.
Look, you can say “Should not be” but that is just your position. For someone else, those “small” steps are not so small, and they don’t want their daughters to have to take them. That is a perfectly valid position, and it deserves respect.
since i am not an Indian, i am not following the thread about NRIs and their return to their Homeland. as i read, i get the picture that India is simply not a safe place for women. i get the impression that women without guardians are viewed as open fodder by a large number of men on the streets, in broad daylight. take your answer here for example, is Bombay completely safe or do women need chauffeurs to keep them safe? to someone unfamiliar with India, this is eye-opening if true.
Just thought I’d link to a NY Times story after the Indians finished a report on the gang rape and suggested actions to take in response.
The article suggests that a lot of these actions are just feel-good rhetoric and will likely not get implemented, but at least it gets the conversation going over there…
Sorry for sidetracking, but this is just incredible. I would watch the news all the time if we had programs that took the time to actually hold politicians’ feet to the fire like this. No getting away with meaningless soundbites or handwaving to let the 30-second segment clock run out.
2:45 “Mr Mukherjee! You are avoiding my questions! But I will not let you!”
I think there have been crimes like this in the usa, like what the serial killers do
What a timely thread to pop up-I can only relate what happened to me within 2 minutes of my husband and cousin leaving me alone at the Delhi train station.
We were in Delhi for one day of tourism and to leave for our honeymoon in Uttarakhand, which is most conveniently reached by taking the train from Delhi to Kathgodam. My cousin-in-law had gone to check on which platform the train would be departing from and my husband, who had consumed 3 beers at dinner, decided that he absolutely needed to find somewhere to pee before we boarded the train. He asked me 10 times if I’d be okay standing right in front of the New Delhi train station with tons of cars and people around (not in some lonely, dark corner). Since I hadn’t had too many negative experiences in India within the last 2 weeks of being there I was like “yeah, go go, stop overreacting, I’ll be totally fine.”
:rolleyes:
Within 2 minutes I spot 3 guys laughing and pointing at me-since I don’t understand Hindi very well I’m like whatever, they probably know I’m an ABCD and maybe they overheard my husband talking to me. That said, I keep an eye on them. They start moving closer and closer to me and whistling and pointing at my body. I am so uncomfortable I turn my back to them so that there is not even a hint of eye contact.
Then all of a sudden I guess all three of them lunged at me, and I feel people grabbing at my arms and breasts and hair, which is very long at the moment and I’ve left loose/down for the day. I start screaming in panic and I see my cousin hurrying towards me and start screaming his name. He shouts something to them in Hindi and starts full on sprinting towards all of us. I feel them release me from the back and then I hear my husband coming back and screaming at them to get away from me and that he will break their faces.
So basically-2 minutes alone in Delhi and I manage to get assaulted in a high-traffic area.
India is changing, and almost every detail here is true, the good and the bad. But there are still two India’s, one for the rapidly improving, upper, educated classes. But for the untouchable, uneducated, living on the street, change has largely not yet come. Yes, the constitution promises protection under the law, for all. But that is not the case for the poor as much as the wealthy. Any discussion that does not acknowledge as much is grievously flawed, in my opinion.
My mother nearly died, in a hospital, in Canada. While miscarrying a pregnancy, because the medically required, life saving abortion she needed could not be performed without her husband’s consent. He was out playing poker and drinking with his buddy’s! That was in my lifetime, in a western nation.
Change comes at it’s own speed. Everyone with eyes can see it is coming, and gaining speed, in India. India is like no other country on earth, and truly culturally ‘unto itself’, as it were. Change will likely come to India, and manifest, in ways the world has never seen before, in my opinion.
Seeing thousands in the street protesting and demanding the police do something, speaks volumes about what views are shifting, and how quickly it’s coming, to me. I expect to see remarkable changes in my lifetime.
( Which is a funny thing to say because when I first visited there, it felt like I’d finally found a country that exposure to western culture, it seemed to me, would never alter the existing culture, and I kind of liked that about it!)
feel sorry for you anu-la. Those guys deserved a proper beating by the people or the police, whoever. I hope there were no more untoward incidents n rest of your trip went well. Congratulations on getting married !
Really? Public beatings in an extrajudicial context would be the answer? I don’t find that to be satisfactory or comforting at all. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really solve the problem, and might actually only reinforce it. The problem is the basic sickness embedded in certain sectors of Indian society. It’s not that there weren’t enough cops or counter-thugs around to beat people up.
well, I don’t mind them in the case of groping. should not injure them badly, but do not mind them getting slapped around a bit. I guess it will not do harm for the satisfaction of the victim.
that’s in addition to the fines and jail-time mandated by the law.
No, really, that attitude is just part of the same underlying problem. People in a civilized society don’t sexually assault women. People in a civilized society also don’t take satisfaction from extrajudicial assault.
People involved in car accidents in India often flee the scene, because they are afraid that a mob will beat them up, regardless of who was actually at fault. Self-help in the form of public beatings is not something you should take pride in.
the other option is to respectfully hand them over to the police, that is if the police is there to be seen. I guess guys feeling breasts of random women have a good chance of getting slapped around if caught even in most liberal societies.
pride is not the question here…
I do not approve of people beating people for a road accident because people mostly do not willfully cause a road accident.
In this case, they willfully indulged in molestation.
I do not believe this to be true.
It should not be up to the mob to decide when extrajudicial punishment is appropriate and when it isn’t. Punishment should be applied only through the due process of the legal system, without exception. If you don’t trust that legal system to operate effectively, then that’s also evidence of a fundamental societal problem.
It’s worth noting that there’s more to this than attitudes toward women. Lots of bits of India are generally violent places. I’m a man* and I wouldn’t stand alone on most train platforms in Delhi wearing Western clothes. On the other hand, I’d be perfectly comfortable in all but the seediest parts of Mumbai even if I was waving wads of dollars or Euros.
*and a big one, as Indians go. I’m the tallest person in my extended family at 6’, which means I tower over the average Indian male.
I was not on the train platform waiting for my train. I was in front of the entire railway station, the New Delhi one, not like Purana Delhi. Sorry, but this was like being assaulted while standing in front of Logan airport near the taxi stand. It was an extremely high traffic and brightly lit area.
Also, I hope there was no implication that I was “wearing western clothes?” I was wearing a knee-length kurti, jeans and a jacket and a scarf-pretty much the standard uniform for young Indian women in the north right now. My husband did not allow me out of the house in Western wear while we were in Delhi because he was afraid for me.
There is absolutely zero reason to be grabbed from behind by your hair and breasts two minutes after your husband leaves your side and the “well, there’s no reason for you to be alone, even I wouldn’t do it” arguments are hilariously close to how the Delhi police suggested that women just not go out EVER after the Nirbaya gang rape happened. Plus, I call bullsh*t on the idea that Indian dudes do not roam around Delhi freely. My husband is North Indian and he and his cousins and friends totally roamed around like wildcats doing whatever they wanted when he lived there (till 2005).
Life in Delhi seems pretty miserable for being a lady-creature unless you are super-rich and chauffeured everywhere.
FTR, he got a good punch in with the one guy he caught and I’m glad he did.
Well, I hope no one is arguing that.
I don’t mean to make light of the situation, but I’m reminded of an old Saturday Night Live sketch in which Joe Mantegna is playing a New York municipal official answering questions about public safety on a radio call-in show and his every reaction is something like “Don’t you know you shouldn’t be making eye contact with strangers?”
And then some guy calls in and says that after a baseball game he was attacked, robbed, set on fire, and thrown off a roof, and Mantegna ridicules him for daring to hang around Yankee Stadium after dark.
I’m not saying that at all, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I’m simply saying that violence in India is not limited to sexual assault.